UNITED STATES COUNCIL FOR AUTOMOTIVE RESEARCH LLC

2015

Team Awards

USCAR Team Awards recognize those teams and members who leveraged their resources, exceeded expectations, overcame challenges and created outstanding value for our member companies.

The Fuel Cell Benchmarking Team, formed in 2015, acquired two Toyota Mirai Fuel Cell sedans and prepared the first comprehensive fuel cell vehicle and components test plan, which identifies key metrics and processes to acquire parameters and share data between USCAR members. Despite the limited availability of hydrogen capabilities, the team found ways to bring OEM facilities online to support this complex, multi-site statement of work.

This activity allows for cost/data sharing and leveraging of fuel cell benchmarking budgets and provides understanding of competitors’ fuel cell and hydrogen storage system technologies, ensuring direct access to components and materials by the USCAR member companies.

The U.S. DRIVE ACEC Fuels Roadmap Sub-Team developed a roadmap that comprehends broad engine technology pathways and strategies for engine combustion and future fuel properties. It also drafted recommendations for key properties of future gasoline and diesel fuels to enable increased engine efficiency and reduced emissions. It conducted a survey of the various emerging low-temperature-combustion recipes and the fuel property requirements of each, completing a draft position statement to respond to the DOE Co-Optima program on future fuel requirements for light-duty applications.

Thanks to this team’s work, U.S. DRIVE has a draft position on future fuel properties for improved engine efficiency and emissions which it can use to guide and respond to the DOE Co-Optima program initiative.

The U.S. DRIVE ACEC Low-Temperature Aftertreatment Sub-Team (LTAT) finalized two protocols in 2015. These are the “Oxidation Catalyst Characterization and Testing Protocol” and “Storage and Release Catalyst Characterization and Test Protocol”. These protocols will serve the greater catalyst community by ensuring low-temperature catalyst technologies are developed and validated under established test conditions to shorten development time and maximize the value of reported data. In addition, the LTAT produced a Natural Gas Aftertreatment Roadmap, to identify potential aftertreatment barriers related to the use of natural gas in advanced combustion mode engines.

The efforts of the LTAT Sub-team have led to the incorporation of these protocols into DOE FOAs intended to support the OEM industry and DOE grants to ACEC members to further develop promising low-temperature aftertreatment catalyst technologies. These activities further align programs at national research facilities with the needs of the U.S. OEMs.

The USAMP Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) of Third Generation Advanced High-Strength Steels Team worked with academia, industry and national labs to create third generation advanced high strength steel that met DOE mechanical property targets on the first iteration of its development.

The team created a functional ICME model for advanced high-strength steel, which integrated modeling and forming models; leveraged external resources to produce, test and data model the 3GAHSS; and developed 3-D representative volume elements that previously did not exist. The team also developed a new laboratory procedure for evaluating retained austenite as a function of strain using high energy x-ray diffraction coupled with digital image correlation.

The USAMP Validation of Carbon Fiber Composite Crash Models Team designed a carbon-fiber composite front bumper/crush can system (FBCC), and developed an understanding of both the strong and weak points of the material models for crash of carbon fiber composites. A robust and computationally promising academic material model was implemented into a user-friendly commercial crash code and is now available to the industry for further evaluation. The team developed fabrication techniques for the composite FBCC, including methods to enable joining using mixed materials, for which they have filed an application for a patent. They also published and/or presented nine technical papers.